Joaks, per JT's question.

[Mark Kohut]

...'the placeless quality of eighteenth century jokes"..---some scholar

A joke, like a comic plot, creates an expectation in its listener, and
it has been argued that humour results from an incongruity between
expectation and result. The so-called 'incongruity theory' (in
contrast to Plato's 'superiority theory' and Freud's 'relief theory')
developed in the work of eighteenth-century thinkers ...

https://books.google.com/books?id=ySoCDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA12&dq=what+were+jokes+like+in+the+eighteenth+century?&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr4uy7vOvYAhVMS60KHa0rAI0Q6AEIRTAF#v=onepage&q=what%20were%20jokes%20like%20in%20the%20eighteenth%20century%3F&f=false
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l